The Effete Elite

Victor Davis Hanson's appraisal of the nation's cultural elites is both accurate and comprehensive.  The author starts by describing the elite rather than defining them, a prudent choice given progressives' penchant for quibbling.  He points out that they "include the academic class in the university that educates our children...[t]he upper echelons that run government departments...an entertainment cadre that oversees television and Hollywood...[and] corporate managers."

Hanson identifies elites' essential characteristics.  One "is a certain allegiance to untruth, to saying one thing and doing another."  Their rhetoric is rife with hypocrisy.  They "clamor for a green cap-and-trade revolution" rejecting compromise "with a fossil fuel near future that would transition us in a half-century or so to renewable energy."  Still, there are few elites "who live green lives."  As is the case with John Edwards and Al Gore, "the bigger and more impressive the home, the better to contemplate how lesser others use too much carbon-based power."  The green sacrifice is left to "coal miners, oil drillers, timber men...classes whose...work brings [elites] instant gratification."

The author adds pointedly that on "matters racial, it gets complicated since advocacy is one thing, living another."  Cultural elites use their 'pull' "to get their kids into college, money to live in a 'good' neighborhood, and 'networking' to marry and 'place' like others from a good background."  Elitists rarely discuss this because to live by their stated beliefs would require them to live in "the San Jose or Fresno mixed suburbs, to have their children school with the 'other'...and to marry their children to Rick Lopez or Tyrone Hiller," in the name of multiculturalism.

Cultural elites' fear of losing their money, privilege, and status by living by their stated beliefs "only heightens [their] shrill and sanctimonious demands on less blessed others to prove their morality."  Elites hide their wrong doing by accusing others of crimes that they themselves have committed.

Hanson ends with the recognition that "there is little logic among the cultural elite...the idea that taxes cause scarcity and subsidy abundance... that entitlements create dependence" is not part of the "worldview of the sheltered elite who navigate in rather protected channels and not in the open seas of the real world."  Logic, or rationally deliberating factually accurate and empirically valid information to establish the relationships between causes and effects makes elitists uncomfortable, as does exposure of the wide divergence between their alleged beliefs and actions. 

For anyone who has not yet recognized that the O-bomunist administration is dedicated to eliminating the First Amendment guarantees and prohibitions for anyone who has the effrontery to disagree with their power grabbing, nationalizing, underhanded dealings, and confiscatory taxation, read this article and follow its links.

A former head of the Federal Elections Commission points out that their proposed legislation reveals about the Corruptocrat members of Congress that they believe "they have the power to violate the First Amendment with impunity and censor the political speech of those who they believe should not be able to speak."  Free speech for the totalitarians but not for the rest of the country is a philosophy that reveals that they are simply too pusillanimous to bear being treated as they treat others.  It is sad that they do so with neither remorse nor shame.

The First Amendment is foundational to the liberty and freedom bequeathed by the Constitution.  To steal liberty is so despicable that one has to wonder as to what sort of benefits they expect to gain by willingly choosing to join the company of Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin.

Now that they were only able to weasel through part of their agenda of selfishness and greed, Senate Majority Leader Red Harry Reid wants to change the Senate rules to aid his cause.  In but one more act of the sort of reprehensible timidity that typifies their Congressional dealings, Reid wants to eliminate the filibuster.  Since they could not win by playing according to the rules to which they had agreed, they want to change them.  There is no act so low that they will not stoop to it.  Fortunately for now, changing those rules requires 67 votes, and after the mid-term elections they will not even have 60.

In an almost universally under covered news story, it seems as though the O-bomatrons were contacted by the WikiLeaks people before the information was made public.  No one representing the White House was interested, at least according to this report from Politisite.  If true, this is either pitifully inept of this administration or another example of what many believe to be a deep and abiding disregard for our military men and women.

Finally, it seems self-defeating to allow virulently anti-American dictator-for-life Hugo Chavez to contribute openly to an organization that promotes illegal immigration.

May your gods be with you.